Friday, 31 March 2017

BEING AWOL & CRUINNIÚ NA CÁSCA

I broke the 100,000 word mark on my novel today. This is AMAZING to me. I write short. Short poems, short-short stories, all my novels are short. This one - Becoming Belle - was originally a lot shorter but I am on my third (!) re-write for my editors and that process has generated wordage. I keep looking at the word count thingumie at the bottom of the screen and thinking, No!! That's not possible. But here we are, and I have a new deadline of the 31st May, so the novel may get even longer. I'm channelling my inner Tolstoy, clearly. It's tough work, involved and brain-melting and, of course, joyful, in the way that re-working and writing new scenes always is.

So excuse this tumbleweedy blog. This novel re-write, work on my short story collection Joyride to Jupiter (out in June!), plus various trips to Dublin, Italy and, next week, New York, mean I am flat out. Add to that, end of year exams and an essay for the course I'm doing in NUI Galway and you can see why I have been AWOL. (Mountains to Sea was fab, btw - Paula Meehan, Vona Groarke and Geraldine Mitchell are poetry goddesses.)

Anyway, I really dropped by here to mention Cruinniú na Cásca and the event I am taking part in with Fionn Davenport, Mark Geary and Sasha Sykes, 'Experiencing Ireland as an Artist'. We will be in St George's Hall, Dublin Castle at 2pm on Easter Monday, 17th April. Admission is free but tickets must be reserved in advance. See here.

In the meantime I am away to Manhattan to commune with my beloved Emily Dickinson at the Morgan Museum. Can't wait!

2 comments:

Ah Nuala, you are such an inspiration to me, reminding me always that to write well, one must write often. If you ever come to Chicago advertise it loudly. I would most certainly make the two hour drive to see and hear you. Well done on your word count!!

MISS EMILY - UK edition

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About Me

Nuala Ní Chonchúir was born in Dublin, Ireland; she lives in East Galway. Her third novel, Miss Emily, published under the name Nuala O'Connor, is out now from Penguin USA, Penguin Canada and Sandstone Press (UK).

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